It's almost crucial for a website to build it's audience using every method possible. A good way of keeping your visitors informed and, most of all, active on your site (don't let them forget you) is by using a newsletter software. Contacting your subscribers from time to time by sending them good newsletters can have a massive impact on your business and earnings as well. We are not going to talk in this tutorial how to keep your subscribers informed and with what but, we are going to learn something. How to collect email addresses to feed our lists. For those of you that are not interested in a tutorial but the application please scroll down to the end of this writing and locate the download link. In my opinion, a "subscribe" form should be visible on all pages that your site is made of and should not be accessible by clicking a link just to get there (this is tested). It should also not reload the page after subscribing or showing any success pages and be time consuming. Very few of them visit your site just to subscribe but if they're there, and they like what you're writing/offering, why not subscribe to your newsletter. A good example would be an ajax form to collect the email addresses and respond with a message without the need to reload or redirect. We will use mootools as a Javascript library and for the AJAX effect, to communicate with a php file which will collect the input of the form and, based on our validation rules, decide what should be done. Our application will be formed from 5 pages: 1 used to connect to the database (db.php), 1 will keep the functions (validation, insertion, etc.) (functions.php), 1 will be used to confirm a subscription after the email is received and the link clicked (confirm.php), 1 will add the subscriber to the database (add.php) and the last one will be the form itself which can be easily implemented into any html or php file. A good thing would be to verify that the subscriber is indeed the owner of the email address provided so I decided to add a "status" field to the MySql table in order to be able to extract only confirmed email addresses when I decide to use them. This will ensure that our list is healthy and that we're not spamming anyone.

CREATE TABLE `subscribers` (   `ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,   `email` varchar(255) NOT NULL,   `rand_key` varchar(32) NOT NULL,   `status` tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '0',   PRIMARY KEY  (`ID`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM;